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Many Jews are horrified at the thought of an open casket...as many non Jews are horrified of being put in the ground in a white shroud and plain wooden box.
That doesn't horrify me at all.
When my daughter was about four years old, she heard my mother and I talking about going to the funeral home because someone had died. She wanted to know what we were talking about.
So I tried to explain that when someone dies, their family is going to miss them, so they dress them up and fix their hair and put makeup on them so their family and friends can see them one last time and say goodbye.
She started laughing and said, "They put makeup on the dead people and everyone comes to look at them? You're making that up!"
Out of the mouth of babes. It is ridiculous. When my brother was dying, he said he wanted to be buried in his favorite sweatshirt and that he did not want to have an open casket and have people coming in to look at his dead body. We put out pictures of him as he was in life, and it was much nicer.
My father had an open casket, but whoever glued his mouth shut had gotten a little out of control with the Krazy Glue and he had sort of this grim look to him that he never had in life. He'd always been smiling.
I don't understand what is so scary about a white shroud and a plain wooden casket.
What I do understand as scary is looking at a lifeless corpse on display.
I don't think it's scary to look at the lifeless corpse, just weird that we do that. Why? They never look good, no matter what anyone says to the bereaved. They look DEAD.
I went to one viewing of the father of a friend where I went up to the casket to be polite. The man was in his early eighties. He'd always been a nice man, and his widow was standing nearby, so I said the usual, "Well, he looks as if he didn't suffer." She said to me, "No, he looks good, doesn't he? He was always such a good-looking man." She then gestured toward his body, with a smile on her face and said, "You can see why I said 'Yes', can't you?"
Uh....yeah, I wanna jump right in that casket on top of him. What the hell do you reply to that?????
Do gentiles get "points" or credit in the afterlife for converting people to Christianity?
I'm guessing definitely no for non-Christians. Similarly, no for Christians. There's even a passage where it says some people who convinced others to convert won't get into Heaven because they themselves were not real believers. That's not an exact quote, but it captures the general message. There's encouragement to go out and tell people, but no reward for it even if you are successful.
Man, you should try doing a taharah and get slapped by the body post-mortem, now that is scary. I don't really think there is are so many tracks when we are talking about death. The way you are brought up, your culture and teachings influence where you find comfort and solace in times of need.
Medieval Christians were rather obsessed with finding symbols in nature that they could identify as allegories for things in the Bible. Eggs were viewed as allegories of Jesus in that they came from life, appear dead, and then bring forth life.
The bunny (and painting the eggs) were holdovers from pagan traditions I think. Every few centuries the Catholic Church would try to remove some of the pagan holdovers it had previously allowed to make converting easier on people, but some things survive this process.
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